i need to work on a thorough, longform explanation of this to call back to periodically, but periodically i'm astonished at how much software is just quietly included in windows that almost nobody knows they have

for instance, a tremendous number of companies either have fax machines they constantly have to dick with to keep working, or they pay for e-fax services

the former they almost certainly feed with mostly printed documents; the latter they usually just send an email to and it turns it into a fax. in other words, they don't actually fax many physical documents

well it turns out every single windows computer for decades has had a built in fax system; not only that, but (at least in win 10, i haven't gone back and looked in older versions yet) it has a complete fax composer, a spooler, and a network server

in 2009 my boyfriend needed to apply to a bunch of nursing homes for jobs, so i had him send me his resume, i plugged my laptop into our landline and i had windows xp fax 60 destinations. it worked perfectly and cost $0

I'm now looking at the larger fax system and it looks like - I haven't confirmed this - that you could run a server in your office with a single phone line, everyone in the office could send faxes from their desk and the server would queue, transmit, retry, etc.

like, this is in your copy of windows 10. it's an entire mail client that speaks fax. it's just here. it's always been here.

Here's the fax composer. Perhaps not the most elegant thing - you can compose in your application of choice if you like, but it's arguably fully featured.

It was there in XP too. The composer wasn't, but honestly, it's a fax, is there much that you would do in a fax that Wordpad won't do?

It did, also, have a fully flexible *cover page* editor, which is probably where the bulk of your imaginative fax work would wind up anyway.

This cover page editor also does a certain amount of mail merge functionality - it can substitute tokens for any of the fax receiver or destination fields, so honestly with a little ingenuity you could process your entire customer invoicing system through this.

In the win 10 version at least you can make your fax server a complete fax machine - it can automatically print received messages, and you can send a fax directly from an attached scanner.

You can even tell it if you have off-peak hours on your landline, so everyone in the office can spool faxes all day, and when 8PM hits, it starts sending them out.

I'm not totally sure (it's hard to find out without testing it) but I suspect it will pool modems as well so you aren't limited to a single line.

I'm also not fully sure how inbound faxes work because I need to set up an entire fax client/server system (and I will, as soon as I have the time, and report back) but it LOOKS like it can probably route INBOUND faxes to multiple users.

This is not just a punchlist app; something to technically fill a role so MS can say "look we support fax." this is a complete, thoughtfully designed fax messaging suite that probably satisfies most business needs, and I wouldn't be surprised if almost no sysadmins know about it.

It does not advertise itself! You have to go looking for it! The feature exists in XP, but only if you go to the "Printers and Faxes" control panel and *right click*

I always knew Windows could fax but it was just this thought floating around in the back of my head, I never went to investigate and see how it worked. If I had, I would have used this all the time when I was in VoIP support, where i needed to fax daily!

Well, what do you expect when there's an "Add Printer" *icon*, but the "Add Fax" option is in a *menu*?

Almost nobody with a business has needed to buy a fax machine in two decades, and yet, do you know how many businesses own them? Every single one. Do you know how many businesses fight with them constantly? Also that number

Fax machines are horrible pieces of garbage, but $0 is the right price for one, and that's how much more it costs to just use the one that's already in everyone's computer. There's no way the Windows service is worse than a real fax machine. It's IMPOSSIBLE.

The typical experience with a hardware fax machine is that you send a fax, realize you hit the wrong number, and have to wait 20 minutes for it to retry multiple times, listening to the person who picks up yell "STOP CALLING ME! FUCK! FUCK YOU!" because you can't fucking cancel.

I've never met a fax machine where you could cancel a fax once started. It's a 20 minute process that cannot be interrupted. I've even pulled the power, plugged one back in, and the fucking bastard kept trying the last fax.

Windows on the other hand appears to let you simply right click and cancel something out of the queue, so, it wins every contest, on that feature alone, hands down, no joke. I am dead serious.

Okay, I had to fire up another VM to confirm this - the Windows Fax utility looks unchanged from Vista. The dark blue toolbar strongly suggested that. So this feature has been finished and available for nearly 15 years.